We’re 13 days into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran—and it seems as ill-conceived and wrong as when it started. Oil prices keep going up. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has taken control of the Iranian government, despite delusional American hopes that the governing regime there would quickly collapse. President Trump and his aides can’t get their stories straight on why the United States started this war and what its end game is. American officials are privately conceding that U.S. military personnel bombed a girls’ school, but Trump is still playing dumb. Congressional Democrats are unsurprisingly furious, but the most notable criticism this week came from Trump 2024 supporter Joe Rogan, who declared himself “betrayed” by a president who in the podcaster’s view had promised not to get into “stupid wars.” It’s entirely possible that in a few weeks, the war is over, the U.S. has killed Mojtaba Khamenei and installed a more American-friendly leader, oil prices are down, and Rogan is back on the Trump Train. But even if scenarios most favorable to Trump play out, Americans should be infuriated and embarrassed that our country is waging this war. This is the second worst war launched by the United States in the last few decades, in my view only eclipsed by the Iraq War that started in 2003. There are three reasons this military action stands out as worse than nearly all others. First and most importantly, there is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. There was no chance Iran would launch a nuclear attack on the United States. There was little immediate indication of an imminent nuclear attack on Israel, an ally of the U.S. who we have long defended. It’s true that the Iranian regime has denied democratic rights to its citizens, killed those who protested, constantly attacked Israel military either directly or through proxies like Hezbollah, and at times tried to develop a nuclear weapons program. No one is claiming that Iran is Switzerland. But nothing happened in the days and weeks before February 28 that required the U.S to suddenly start dropping bombs on Iran. This lack of a clear rationale has left the administration giving multiple and at times contradictory explanations for the war. The Wall Street Journal had stories on Wednesday with headlines, “The Trump Team’s Evolving Messages on Iran” and “Trump Says the Iran War Is Nearly Won But Israel Has Other Ideas.” Those headlines capture the strategic confusion at play. The U.S. is two weeks into a war that it’s not exactly sure why it’s fighting and out of sync with its partner (Israel) in the conflict. This dynamic is unusual. Most recent U.S. military interventions had clear (although at times misguided) justifications. Some of those justifications, such as the 1991 Gulf War in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, were very compelling. Likewise it made sense that the United States would overthrow the Taliban following the September 11 attacks, though the Taliban ended up back in power 20 years later. Even the Iraq War had a clear justification—-the Bush administration, many congressional Democrats, and many journalists wrongly but sincerely believed that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Second, this war not only didn’t have the approval of Congress or the American public, but it happened despite explicit opposition from them. The administration had been hinting that it would attack Iran for months, so news organizations conducted polls on the idea. And the surveys showed public opposition to a war in Iran far outpaced support. Americans used to “rally around the flag” after our troops formally entered a conflict, leading to more support for both the president and the war. Not here. Public support for this war still remains well below 50 percent, according to numerous surveys. Congress is always trying to duck taking responsibility for foreign policy, so it hasn’t given a clear authorization of military force since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We’ve had 20 years of presidential-led military action in Syria, Somalia, and numerous other places. Usually though Congress tacitly approves or at least doesn’t strongly object to the conflict. But in this case, congressional Democrats had been complaining for weeks about Trump unilaterally overthrowing Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro and clearly didn’t want a repeat of such military action. And I doubt congressional Republicans would have voted to attack Iran, because much of their base is also wary and tired of the U.S. fighting wars in the Middle East. Trump didn’t even get informal support. I could imagine a scenario where members of both parties’ Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate and Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, the two very pro-Israel figures who lead the Democrats, were briefed and signed onto this war before it started. That wouldn’t be ideal, but better than nothing. That doesn’t seem to have happened either.